‘But this isn’t the Lord’s place, this is the Devil’s place…’
A coastguard helicopter pilot ends up stranded on a pleasure boat in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle after responding to a distress call. The only survivor tells him a strange story of a shipwrecked priest and mysterious lightning storms. And one of the dead crew appears to be floating in mid-air…
The Bermuda Triangle was big news back in the day; an area of the Atlantic Ocean where many ships, and even aircraft, have gone missing under strange circumstances over the past couple of hundred years. Many books and journalistic articles attempted to explain the phenomenon, with theories ranging from the plausible (freak weather, mechanical malfunction and human error) to the rather more outlandish (aliens, time travel, dimensional portals). And we still don’t know for sure, but, sadly, some pesky bugger invented GPS and the disappearances just stopped. Which is why you seldom hear about ‘The Triangle’ anymore. But in the 1970s it was still a hot topic, and there were several movies about it, including this effort commissioned by the ABC TV network.
The film opens with chopper pilots Doug McClure and Michael Conrad scrambling to answer a mayday. Their sister helicopter bails on the way due to mechanical problems (nor unusual in ‘The Triangle’ by all accounts) and our heroes are left to deal with the crisis alone. McClure is dropped on board and finds priest Alejandro Rey hanging from the main mast, Captain Ed Lauter dead on deck and Jim Davis floating in one of the storage cabins. Also below decks is a shell-shocked Kim Novak, who tells a tale of bad luck, bad weather, and bad juju. McClure is having none of her supernatural interpretation of events, however, and sets out to find a more rational explanation.
On the plus side, this is a very competent production directed by Sutton Roley, a veteran of many TV shows such as ‘Kojak’, ‘Airwolf’ and ‘Starsky and Hutch.’ Filming on the water is notoriously difficult, but it seems to have gone well here, although there are a lot of low-angle shots from the deck where the ocean is not visible. The strange weather SFX are not particularly convincing, though, and betray the project’s age and limited budget. Curiously, ‘The Bermuda Triangle’ is never mentioned specifically (it’s just ‘The Triangle’ or ‘The Devil’s Triangle); giving rise to the possibility that some other filmmakers owned the rights to the name, unlikely though that seems. Perhaps they just didn’t want to upset the Bermudan Tourist Board.
Screenwriter William Read Woodfield was originally a stage hypnotist, who came up with the idea of making a film which would simply hypnotise the audience into thinking it was the best movie they’d ever seen. This eventually became unusual shocker ‘The Hypnotic Eye’ (1960) which provided him with a way into the business, and he contributed scripts for ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’, ‘Mission: Impossible’, ‘Columbo’ and ‘The Fall Guy’ among many other top TV shows. But it’s his work here that ultimately torpedoes this film. The last 10 minutes are very silly indeed, and turn what had been a halfway decent suspense picture into a stupid comedy. The performances were solid enough up until then, with Novak being the pick of the bunch, but the final story twist gives rise to some terrible hamming, particularly from McClure.
‘Hello Girls!’
Novak was a major Hollywood player in the 1950s, starring in hits such as ‘Picnic’ (1955), ‘Pal Joey’ (1957) and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958). McClure spent his career in a TV Stetson and fighting rubber dinosaurs or humanoid fishmen on the big screen. The remainder of the cast are familiar too; Conrad from ‘Hill Street Blues’, Davis from ‘Dallas’ and Rey from ‘The Flying Nun'(!), although all made many guest appearances on network TV shows.
The talent was solid; the execution professional, but that ending…oh dear. Yes, it’s worth waiting for and it’s pretty hilarious, but I don’t think that’s what the filmmakers probably had in mind…
Curiously enough, as of early 2017, there were rumours of three new ‘Triangle’ pictures in the works; one supposedly involving ‘Evil Dead’ and ‘Spider-Man’ wrangler, Sam Raimi. I guess even non-mysteries make a comeback in the end…
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